The way things are goinghere on Earth, we’re going to need to colonize Mars soon. A new hard science fiction picture book (how often do we hear those words?) will not only get your kid excited about blasting off to the Red Planet, it’s chock-full of lessons about how to survive once there.

Freeline skates are a pair of skates that are completely separate from each other, and simply riding them seems impossible. A skateboard is one solid deck, and roller blades are attached to your feet. But freeline skates? Each part has two inline wheels, and somehow you have to somehow control both at the same time by…

There was no happy ending, no neat resolution, when Moe bullied Calvin out of his toy truck. But during that two week stretch of Calvin & Hobbes strips from 1989, cartoonist Bill Watterson made a dark but salient point about how unfair life can be. It was a gutsy move, and it resonated with anyone who had a less than…

Mike Lanza, a dad and tech entrepreneur from Menlo Park, California, thinks we’re experiencing a crisis in child-rearing: Boys aren’t allowed to play rough or run free, and moms hover nervously at the margins of children’s social worlds, chirping reminders about sharing and playing nice. The result, he explains in a…

There’s a growing amount of tech out there, from apps to wearables, designed to help you keep tabs on your children: where they are, what they’re up to, who they’re talking with, and so on. Here’s how to watch what your kids are up to without making them feel like they’re constantly living in a surveillance state.

They say parents will do anything for their kids, but surely there has to be a line that gets drawn somewhere after dressing up like Santa, but before having to wear this Piggyback Driver helmet. It lets kids steer where they want mom or dad to go while getting a piggyback ride, but shouldn’t kids just be happy they…

Bose has a long history of making great-yet-pricey speakers. But its latest, the BoseBUILD Speaker Cube, is a first for the company—a build-your-own speaker, intended for kids. It’s designed to help teach the basic concepts of sound and speaker design. It’s a cool idea, with dead simple setup and instructions, but for…

You’ve already taken your summer trip, it’s too hot to do anything outside, and the kids are tired of the library. It’s the perfect time for at-home science experiments. These five experiments are fun even if you don’t have kids, but if you do, there’s even more reason to spend an afternoon exploring science.

When I was five, I was repeatedly falling off my bike and making my Barbies do weird things to each other. Oliver, however, puts my five-year-old self to shame, because he’s over here making cool YouTube videos about tornadoes.

Having apparently run out of fairy tales to retell, those gilded Little Golden Books that probably graced your bookshelves as a child have two new tomes coming out in the fall that adorably tell the stories of both the original and new specter-battling Ghostbusters.

There’s a common refrain among people of a certain age: “Wow, I’m really glad I wasn’t a teenager in the age of smartphones and Snapchat.” They’re not wrong. After polling over 10,000 18-year-olds from 25 different countries, a new UNICEF study confirms that being a teen online these days is fraught with risk, danger,…

Okay, so he had a lot of help from his dad, but this third grader’s school project—a wooden model of the Steel Bridge in Portland—is totally awesome. It has all the moving parts of the real bridge; both the lower and upper decks can be lifted to make way for boats on the river.

When you place your ballpark side order of peanuts and Cracker Jack this summer, be prepared for a shock. Instead of a box, your Cracker Jack will be delivered in a slimy plastic bag. And instead of a prize, you get a QR code.

In the tech industry, paid leave is becoming a sought-after benefit for employees, and for employers like Spotify, Twitter, Etsy, Netflix, it’s become an explicit priority. But, as Rebecca Greenfield writes at Bloomberg, these policies are made feasible partly because the tech workforce is still mostly male.

On May 1, Twitter will start offering both male and female employees 20 weeks paid parental leave. As with Etsy, Netflix and Facebook, the company seems to have realized that people who feel like their home life is in balance tend to do better at work.

Oh to be a kid again when even lawn work could be fun. This genius kid strapped himself up in a leaf blower and started spinning around in circles because the air blowing out was so powerful. He looks like he’s having the time of his life! He looks like a superhero first learning the powers of his suit! He looks like…

We have a vaccine against the virus that causes cervical cancer. It’s as safe as any other vaccine, and getting it for your tween son or daughter—or yourself, if you’re in your early twenties—is a no-brainer. Don’t buy into bogus exposés on “dangers” that don’t really exist.